Looking Back and Ahead: Exploring Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives - Debrecen University Symposium, 2024

24 October, 2024

Daniel Béland
Director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, McGill University
“The Partisan Politics of Immigration in the United States and Canada”
Immigration is a crucial aspect of the current U.S. presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who has both exacerbated and exploited the sense of insecurity stemming from issues of border control and immigrant settlement. Meanwhile, in Canada, the post-pandemic increase in the number of temporary foreign students and workers, the ongoing housing affordability crisis, and concerns about the treatment and territorial distributions of asylum seekers have trigged a major debate about the country’s immigration policies. In this brief presentation, I will compare and contrast current U.S. and Canada immigration debates as they relate to electoral competition among political parties.

Daniel Béland is Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and James McGill Professor, Department of Political Science, McGill University. A student of politics and public policy, Professor Béland has published more than 20 books and 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and his work has been cited more than 16,000 times. In addition to his academic work, Professor Béland has participated in numerous training sessions for civil servants, provided policy advice to federal and provincial officials, and testified in front of the Saskatchewan Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission, Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, and the Standing Committee on Finance of the House of Commons (Canada). Moreover, he is very frequently asked to comment on key policy and political issues by Canadian and international media outlets.

Endre Farkas
Montreal-based poet, novelist and playwright
“SZERBUSZ” (poetry reading)
One of my Muses, inspirations/demons during my writing life has been Hungary, my birthland but not my homeland. Due to the nature and circumstances of my leaving Hungary, I have felt a longing and anger for and towards this country. These poems have been triggered by this complex love-hate relationship.

Endre Farkas is a poet, author and playwright living in Canada. He has published 13 books of poetry, 2 novels and had three plays produced. He has toured, read and performed across Canada, United States, Europe and South America. He has been an editor, publisher, one of the founders of Quebec Writers Federation and president of the Quebec English Language Publishers Association.
 

Dennis Gruending
Journalist, former MP
A Communist for the RCMP: A Police Informant and the Canadian Security State
Canadians think of their country as a bastion of “peace, order and good government,” but Canada’s history also contains darker counter-narratives.  One example is the massive surveillance conducted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The force’s Security Service opened files on over eight hundred thousand individuals and organizations in Canada between 1919 and 1979. The RCMP justified these intrusions as necessary to combat communism.  The most effective way of doing that was to use paid informants to infiltrate the Communist Party. 

In a new book titled A Communist for the RCMP: The Uncovered Story of a Social Movement Informant, author, and former Member of Parliament Dennis Gruending tells the story of one such informant. In 1906, Frank Hadesbeck emigrated to Canada as an infant from Hungary. His family encountered great hardship, and Hadesbeck became an itinerant farm worker during the Great Depression. He was recruited by the RCMP as an informant in 1941. For the next thirty-five years, he provided information, not only on members of the Communist Party, but also on hundreds of non-communist progressives.

Defying warnings from his RCMP handlers, Hadesbeck kept notes describing his life as an informant and interactions with his handlers. He died in 2006, and in 2019 Gruending obtained his unpublished papers from a third party. The ensuing book uses resources such as Ancestry, Canadian census reports, family documents, and interviews to create a profile of Hadesbeck’s early life and struggles. Hadesbeck’s secret notes are key to describing his career, but are complemented in the book by other academic, journalistic, and archival sources. Library and Archives Canada holds the records of the Security Service, and the book makes extensive use of material obtained under Canada’s Access to Information Act.

One academic reviewer described the book as “ground-breaking.” Another wrote: “A Communist for the RCMP provides stunning insights into the nuts and bolts of the force’s infiltration campaigns.”

Dennis Gruending is an Ottawa-based writer, a former Member of Parliament and author of the blogs Great Canadian Speeches and Pulpit and Politics.  He has worked as a print and television journalist, as a CBC Radio host, and has written or edited nine books. The most recent, released in June 2024, is A Communist for the RCMP: The Uncovered Story of a Social Movement Informant. He has produced two books about political speeches (Speeches That Changed Canada and Great Canadian Speeches). His book Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life, examined the growing competition between religious progressives and conservatives for power and influence in Canadian politics. He is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada and of the Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians.
 

Mapping Montreal Panel
The panel introduces an international collaboration started at the end of 2023 with the participation of the Consulate General of Hungary in Montreal, the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University, and the University of Debrecen. The aim of the research project is to explore and preserve the history and heritage of Hungarians in Montreal through a combination of archival research, oral history interviews, and a digital mapping solution. As part of the collaboration, numerous interviews have been conducted in the summer of 2024, materials have been digitized, and the first version of the planned interactive map has been developed. This panel outlines how the collaboration was established and how it expanded (with talks from Consul General Helga Pritz and COHDS Co-director Barbara Lorenzkowski), and introduces some of its first results, including a publication on the history of the Hungarian St. Stephen’s Ball in Montreal and the interactive map of the city showcasing organizations and venues related to the Hungarian diaspora (presented by Balázs Venkovits, UD). With a talk by Sonya di Sclafani (COHDS) we also highlight another ongoing research project related to the Hungarian diaspora in Montreal.

Dr. Barbara Lorenzkowski was born in Germany where she studied journalism at the TU Dortmund and history at the Ruhr-University Bochum. She worked for a wide range of print media and broadcasting institutions, graduating in 1995 with a Diploma in Journalism (MA equivalent). A one-year “adventure” as an international student at the University of Ottawa turned into a life-long love for the study of history. She went on to obtain her MA in History (1996) and PhD in History (2002), both from the University of Ottawa, winning the Pierre Laberge Prize for an outstanding dissertation in the humanities. She found her voice as a teacher at the University of Nipissing, where she was hired in 2002, and joined Concordia’s Department of History in 2008. As both an oral historian and a teacher, Dr. Lorenzkowski seeks to explore the ways in which global processes of migration, displacement, and violence have shaped small people’s lives in outsized ways.

Helga Katalin Pritz, a career diplomat, started working at the Africa Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after her graduation, then served at the embassies in Moscow and Nigeria. She was later appointed Deputy Head of Department for North Africa and the Mediterranean Union, later First Officer and then Interim Chargé d'Affaires at the Embassy of Hungary in Paris. She was Hungary's ambassador to Algeria and Mali for five years and is currently head of the Hungarian Consulate General in Montreal. The mother of two children, she speaks French, English and Russian.

Balázs Venkovits is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. He is the director of the Institute of English and American Studies and the Canadian Studies Centre at the university. He earned his Ph.D. in 2014 and completed his habilitation in 2021. Among others, he is the recipient of OTKA (2022-26) and Jedlik (2013-14) grants, a JFK Research Fellowship (2013) and a Fulbright (2010-2011). His academic interests include travel writing studies, migration studies, Hungarian immigration to North America, with a special emphasis on Hungarians in Canada in and after the 1920s.
 

Mélissa-Anne Ménard
Concordia University
“Voices in the Field: A Critical Approach to Reusing Archived Oral History Interviews” 
While there exists a plethora of studies that engage with the ethics, theory, and methodology of oral history interviewing, there exists only a handful about working with existing oral history collections we have not conducted ourselves. Sometimes considered second to conducting one’s own interviews, as April Gallwey has demonstrated, reusing existing material offers immense possibilities, not the least of which is gaining precious insight into lived experience from long-gone narrators. Additionally, reuse can be a way of ensuring these stories live on and, to borrow Dr. Steven High’s term, are “activated” after their telling. In other words, when done ethically, reuse can be a way of honouring narratives entrusted to researchers even after the moment or archival. With the countless collections and interviews currently in existence – often lying dormant– it is imperative to develop approaches and tools to explore interviews for which the context often eludes us.

I argue that understanding the various layers of context in which interviews and collections are created – administrative, conceptual and experiential to name a few considerations – is key to the ethically, effectively and sustainably reusing archived oral history interviews. Using the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project collection as a case study, I propose one such approach by gaining robust, albeit always partial, insights into the project’s creation process through my own interviews with the collection’s project manager, Dr. Joanna Sassoon, and with several interviewers involved with the project. I will also touch on the importance of metadata and the role and responsibility of archives and libraries in contextualizing sources and thus facilitating reuse.

Mélissa-Anne Ménard is an oral historian whose main research interests center on the history of childhood and emotions, stories of migration, and the production of archives. She first encountered oral history during an undergraduate seminar in childhood history. Mélissa-Anne holds a master’s degree in history from Concordia university, partially funded by a Concordia University Merit Scholarship. Her thesis explored the ethical and methodological ramifications of reusing archived oral history interviews conducted by other researchers to develop frameworks and protocols to allow us to engage with countless oral history collections that often lie dormant in archives.

Anna Porter
Hungarian-born Canadian author and publisher
“Falling in Love with Canada (one book at a time)”
I was born in a land of stories: Hungary, and fell in love with another land of stories: Canada. I arrived here in 1968 with a small blue suitcase that contained all of my belongings. I was fortunate to have landed a job in publishing, where I met and worked with some of the best writers in this country, Margaret Laurence, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Richard Gwyn, Farley Mowat, Sylvia Fraser, W.O. Mitchell. I started my own publishing company some 15 years later and worked with Josef Skvorecky, my fellow central European DP, Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Joe Clarke, Arctic storyteller Fred Bruemmer, the extraordinary Basil Johnston, whose Indian School Days blew the top off Canada’s residential schools, and Dennis Lee, and George Jonas, a fellow Hungarian refugee, whose memoir, Beethoven’s Mask, is a riveting tale of our last horrendous century.

Anna Porter’s non-fiction books include Buying a Better World: George Soros and Billionaire Philanthropy, The Ghosts of Europe, winner of the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, Kasztner’s Train, the True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, winner of the 2007 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Award and of the Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction. She has also written six novels, a memoir, and numerous articles. Her most recent novel is Gull Island. Anna Porter is co-founder of Key Porter Books, a company with a wide-ranging  list that included Farley Mowat, Joan Barfoot, Fred Bruemmer, Norman Jewison, Hume Cronyn, George Jonas, Margaret Atwood, The Right Honourable Jean Chretien, Sylvia Fraser, Modris Eksteins, John Keegan, Martin Gilbert, Irving Abella, Josef Skvorecky, Italo Calvino, William Trevor, Conrad Black and Janet Lunn. She sold majority interest in the company in 2004. She is an Officer of The Order of Canada and has been awarded the Order of Ontario.

David Staines
University of Ottawa
“Contemporary Canadian Fiction: Forty Years On”
In 1984 Debrecen launched a Canadian Studies programme, years ahead of other European universities. And the situation in Canada and its fiction in 1984 was relatively solid. In the intermittent forty years, much has changed, the worlds of Canadian fiction have much altered and expanded, and contemporary fiction suggests new ways of approaching and reacting to these major developments.

David Staines is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Formerly dean of the Faculty of Arts for eight years, he is internationally respected as a scholar of medieval literature and Canadian literature and culture. The author and/or editor of more than 20 books in these fields, he is also the translator of The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes. In 1998, he received the Lorne Pierce Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada, for outstanding contributions to Canadian criticism. In 2006, he published The Letters of Stephen Leacock, which was listed as one of the 100 best books of the year by the Globe and Mail. In 2011, he was invested into the Order of Ontario and into the Order of Canada. In 2021, he published A History of Canadian Fiction. 
 

25 October, 2024

Tidita Abdurrahmani
Bedër University College, Albania
Self, Otherness and Gendered Identities in Alice Munro’s Writings. A Close Reading of “The Albanian Virgin”
Domestic and foreign scholars tend to study Munro’s stories from two main aspects of narrative strategy and feminism, but they often neglect the post-colonial nature of Munro’s writing, they also fail to acknowledge the indigenous nature of Canada/Ontario that Alice Munro has been addressing in her selected short stories  Therefore, starting from the post-colonial perspective, this paper attempts to deeply explore the construction of post-colonial features reflected in Munro’s writing to have a deeper understanding of her works. The present paper aims to explore the complex articulation of gendered identities in Alice Munro’s collected stories, focusing on particular tales and examining representations of identity that problematize the borderline between self and otherness. The paper than goes deeper into a comparative approach to the way how Munro depicts gendered/engendered identities in “The Albanian Virgin” as compared to other writings of hers which deserve a close postcolonial reading. In “The Albanian Virgin,” Munro constructs a subtle narrative in which the two worlds and the two stories interpenetrate. Rather than reinforcing formally the notion of dissimilarity and separateness, the structure of the story underscores the mutuality of these two worlds. Both worlds are shown to be fragmented, divided according to numerous, often interrelated, and inevitably destructive binaries: male-female, knowable-mysterious, ordinary-fantastic, rational-intuitive. Complicating these relations is an apparently transhistorical, transcultural sexual politics that taints all cultural interaction with an imbalance of power and the potential for conflict.

Prof. Associate Dr. Tidita Abdurrahmani is Dean of Faculty of Technology and Business Beder University, and a lecturer in the Humanities, English Studies, and Education Sciences. Mrs. Abdurrahmani has received a PhD in Graz Austria, and the academic degree of Associate Professor Doctor by the University of Tirana with domains of interest focusing on American Literature and Culture. The professor has been a lecturer on a university level for over 20 years, academic leader for over 8 years(among which holding position as Head Department of Education Studies,Dean Faculty of Philology and Education and Dean Faculty of Technology and Business.  Mrs. Abdurrahmani has also been CEO involved in the leadership of an educational institute for 4 years and principal researcher in several projects in the field of education, humanities, and translation studies. Prof. Abdurrahmani has been acting as a chairperson or member of executive and editorial boards to several conferences in the field of Education and English studies as well as a chief editor to several journals. 

Mrs. Abdurrahmani has been involved in executing sociocultural and educational research for more than a decade and has been a contributor in researches on such issues as ethnic studies, American literature and cultural studies, postmodernist studies, curriculum design and assessment, educational reforms, curriculum and cultural orientation, psycholinguistics and child development, sociolinguistics and dealing with children of culturally heterogenous background, media literacy, inclusive education, and pre-service and in-service teacher training. In the position of head of an educational institution for over 4 years Prof. Abdurrahmani has been part of the policy designing and decision-making groups set up by the Ministry of Education and Science on such issues as curriculum design, curriculum evaluation and curriculum implementation, teacher pre- service and in-service training, the continuous professional development schemes for teachers and development of methodological and didactic material for teachers. The candidate has lead as principal researcher several projects in the field of education and multiculturalism such as projects on child-friendly schools, no child left behind policy, projects for inclusive education for disabled children and marginalized strata, projects on inclusion of elements of multicultural elements in the curricula etc.

Professor Abdurrahmani is author to 10 publications in indexed journals with impact factor, 12 publications of articles in non-indexed journals with external assessment in the field of expertise required by the postdoc fellowship. The candidate is also author of a monography on the self and postmodern American autobiography as well as co-author to 5 books or chapters of published books. Results of the scholarly research on cultural translation and postmodern American literature with primary focus on women’s autobiography have been promulgated in 25 national and international conferences published in 22 publications with external assessment, resulting from congresses. As a lecturer the candidate has been involved for two years consecutively in lecturing to the master students of the Center for Interamerican Studies Karl Franzens Universitaet Graz. The main achievements of the lecturer are a. more than 20 years of continuous upgrading in teaching, research skills and research leadership, and b. strong capacity for teamwork and a growing establishment of international collaborations.
 

Ahmet Uruk and Ayşenur Kör
Gümüşhane University, Turkey
Negotiating Canadian Identity and Nature: Eco-Nostalgia in Jane Urquhart’s Sanctuary Line
Referring, primarily, to the intersection of ecology and nostalgia, the term ‘eco-nostalgia’ signifies a profound yearning for a distant past endowed with an intact nature and harmonious relationship between natural environment and human beings. Intertwined closely with ecological memory and the idealization of a rural past, eco-nostalgia proves essentially to be an ecocritical tool for the scrutiny of the deterioration and exploitation of the natural environment, the idyllic presence of nature in the past, and the ecological balance between the environment and the humankind. In view of the significance laid on the communion between the human self and nature, the rural past is considered, by many, to occur as a literary framework to be utilized by the authors both from previously colonized territories and highly industrialized countries, thereby allowing them to emphasize their sense of belonging to nature not altered by human factors and their cultural identity, which is defined by their closeness to a serene rurality. In this respect, Jane Urquhart’s novel Sanctuary Line (2010), based considerably on the vivid memories of Liz, the protagonist, and her mediation on the pristine nature, idyllic childhood, and her rural family in Lake Erie in Canada, makes it obvious that Liz tends to associate nature and rural past with her own self and a distinct Canadian identity, an identity of a country characterized by a wide geography, uncanny wilderness, and untouched nature. Thus, this paper seeks to argue that untamed nature in Sanctuary Line constitutes both an individual memory and a Canadian identity through Liz’s personal recollections by deploying eco-nostalgia as a theoretical framework.

Ahmet URUK received his master's degree from Ege University, Department of English Language and Literature with his thesis titled "The Other within the Self: Postmodern Monstrosity in Patrick McGrath's Novels", and he is a PhD student at Atatürk University in English Language and Literature. He undertook an Erasmus exchange at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Debrecen in Hungary for a year in 2017-2018. In addition to his academic interest in Gothic literature and monster studies, he also specializes in ekphrasis and magical realism. He has been working as a Research Assistant at Gümüşhane University, Faculty of Letters, Department of English Language and Literature since 2020.

Ayşenur KÖR, a Research Assistant at the Department of English Language and Literature at Gümüşhane University, Turkey, graduated from Translation and Interpreting Studies. After gaining her master’s degree in Applied Linguistics, she has continued her academic career with PhD on English Language and Literature and conducted research on applied linguistics and language education. Her publications include Student Engagement in Online Education, Student Participation, Silence in Classroom, The Relationship between Teachers’ Teaching Style and Students’ Academic Engagement, University Students’ Digital Literacy, and Written Corrective Feedback in EFL Classroom. She also performs her duty as a language editor in two international journals and as a field editor in an international journal.

Anikó Zsuzsanna Antal
independent researcher, Toronto, Canada
The Thunderbirds Metamorphosis From Images Into Words - Armand Garnet Ruffo’s Poetry in the Mirror of Norval Morrisseau’s Indigenous World
Norval Morrisseau (1932-2007), the remarkable Indigenous artist, was called the Picasso of the North by many people. Armand Garnet Ruffo, a contemporary Canadian poet, who also wrote the biography of Morrisseau, organizes the painter's most famous images into four life cycles in his volume called “Thunderbirds Poems”, supplemented by his own ekphrastic writings. Through paintings and poetry, the author reveals Morrisseau's deepest inspirations, including Ojibway epistemology and indigenous culture and the feeling of being torn between the Ojibway heritage and the influences of the western world. The bird and the metamorphosis are recurring motifs in Morisseau's art, which faithfully express the striving towards wholeness, and try to convey a deep spiritual and universal message from the past to the future generation. In my presentation, through a more detailed analysis of the paintings and poems, I would like to present the creative world of these two artists and their influence.

Anikó Zsuzsanna Antal was born in Hungary and graduated at the University of Nyíregyháza, majoring in Hungarian-French Language and Literature. She continued her studies at the University of Miskolc, specializing in Hungarian Language and Literature. After earning her master's degree, she became a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Literary Studies at the University of Debrecen. Anikó’s research publications, book reviews, poems and short stories have been published in several periodicals. Beside literature, music plays an important part of her life, she plays the viola at many orchestras in Toronto.
 

Jennifer Baker
University of Ottawa
Kate Beaton’s Ducks and the Emergence of the Necro-georgic in Canadian Literature
The georgic mode has been strongly present in Canadian literature as both a nation-building discourse and a discourse about the relationship between human labour and environment since Ed Rivers proclaimed in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague that “I have studied the Georgicks and am a pretty enough kind of husbandman as far as the theory goes” (Brooke 25-26). But while the history of Canadian literature is lush with depictions of transformative human labour on the landscape, very few studies of the mode have been available in English Canadian literature to track engagements with its conventions. Kate Beaton’s Ducks may at first seem to have nothing to do with the georgic; it is primarily concerned with depictions of labour in Canada’s oil sands and the deleterious ethical, environmental, and social effects of Canada’s dependence on fossil fuel extraction. 

But reading Ducks through the lens of the history of the georgic mode in Canadian literature allows us to contextualize fossil fuel extraction within broader historical discourses of Canadian nation-building, industrialization, and human-nonhuman relations. Reading Kate Beaton’s Ducks through the georgic mode and using Macarena Gómez-Barrie’s concept of the extractive zone, Achille Mbembe’s concept of necro-politics, and Zoe Todd’s meditations on fossil fuels as ancestral remains, I argue that Ducks represents an important shift in georgic discourses in Canada from agriculture to the extractive relations of fossil fuel production as the engine of nation and empire building. Ducks engages with what I call an emergent genre in Canadian literature: the necro-georgic, a sub-mode of the georgic that understands settler-colonialist and capitalist labour as existing in extractive relationships with the land that devalue human and non-human lives and bodies, producing only death.

Dr. Jennifer Baker is a poet and professor (LTA) in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches courses in Canadian Literature, Digital Communication, Environmental Humanities, and Creative Writing. Her current research focuses on the georgic mode’s history and persistence in Canadian literature and its role in the formation of Canadian agricultural practices and discourses.

Jason Blake
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Coming to Grips with Canadian Short Stories of Multiculturalism
Whenever we encounter the strange, we make sense of it by shifting it into patterns that we are already familiar with. The results are often mixed. When non-Canadian students read Canadian literature, they necessarily adopt various strategies for understanding what they are reading. Students apply various strategies to come to grips with literature, including: grafting stereotypes onto texts (assuming that “Canuck” must be an insult term); using acquired knowledge to read texts (assuming that all texts by Indigenous authors include a trickster character or a profound love of nature); reverting to theme-spotting (looking for snow and survival in every story); and overemphasizing the Canadian aspect of a story (assuming that a story or poem must be quintessentially Canadian). This paper considers insider and outsider viewpoints and how they affect the ways we derive meaning and enjoyment from narratives. It does so by leaning on narrative theory but especially by considering classroom experiences I have had while discussing short stories by Thomas King (“Borders”), Ian Williams (“Bro”), David Bezmozgis. (“Immigrant City”), Jack Wang (“The Valkyries”), Souvankham Thammavongsa (“How to Pronounce Knife”) and others. What these stories have in common is multiculturalism – a term that has perhaps because the Canadian narrative; it is also a term that travels with bulky baggage. The argument is that knowledge about Canadian can cloud reading pleasure as the commonsensical is obscured by the cerebral.

Jason Blake is a professor in the University of Ljubljana’s English Department. He is the editor-in-chief of The Central European Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes en Europe centrale, the author of Canadian Hockey Literature, the co-editor (with Andrew C. Holman) of The Same but Different: Hockey in Quebec, and the author of Culture Smart! Slovenia, a guide living in Slovenia. As well, he has published a trio of writing guides aimed at Slovenian students writing in English.

Doina Ciochina
Sherbrooke University
Bodies as Commodities and Stolen Identities in Horror: A Comparative Study of Never Whistle at Night and Get Out
In the realm of horror storytelling, literature and movies, the themes of stealing, collecting and colonization have been often explored. Several indigenous scholars and intellectuals have argued that “literary tropes common in speculative fiction, such as contact with alien species, apocalyptic disasters or dystopian scenarios, can be easily related to the lived experiences of many Indigenous communities” (Eguíbar-Holgado 4). In the introduction of Mitêwâcimowina: Indigenous Science Fiction and Speculative Storytelling by Neal McLeon, he explains how science fiction “has imagined possibilities of science fiction” (4) and that often it might have been used in projects of colonialism. This means that Indigenous writers might have used science fiction to critique science and how technology was used to disseminate their colonialism. This is why speculative fiction resonates more with Indigenous experiences. McLeod’s discussion highlights the importance of recognizing the diversity and complexity of Indigenous experiences and identities. Indigenous speculative fiction includes a wide range of themes and perspectives that reflect on the multitude aspects of Indigenous cultures and histories. Never Whistle at Night is a collection of twenty-six short stories written by Indigenous authors from the United States and Canada. This anthology is a great contribution to Indigenous literature and storytelling. It provides a platform for Indigenous authors to share their perspectives, voices and stories, challenging stereotypes and lack of representation in mainstream literature. Some stories have supernatural or horror elements while others don’t deal with any paranormal themes. In this work, I will analyze two of the short stories from the anthology that highlight how Indigenous bodies have been exploited and how their bodies have been objectified: “Collections” by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala and “Navajos Don’t Wear Elk Teeth” by Conley Lyons. Drawing parallels with the critically acclaimed horror movie Get Out, I will explore how the exploitation of Black bodies with the context of systemic racism and white supremacy resonates with the themes presented in Never Whistle at Night. By examining the resemblance between these narratives, one can gain a deeper understanding of the systemic forces at play and the ways in which they impact the lives and bodies of marginalized communities.

Doina Ciochina is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Sherbrooke University. After completing her formation in translation and literary translation, she took the challenge of a second master’s degree in English studies. Her major interests are languages, literature, and mostly the fantasy genre. Being an environmentalist, she wanted to combine two of her great passions: the environment and literature, transforming it in her PhD dissertation working on ecocriticism and speculative fiction.

Shelley Hornstein
York University
Discrimination by Design: Jews, Resort Architecture, and the Canadian Countryside
Much like the restricted rural hotels across the United States, Canadian resorts that discriminated against Jewish patrons had a similar distasteful backstory. The deplorable signage now in archival documents such as: “No Jews Allowed” or “Gentiles Only” made clear the rampant antisemitism and racism in Canada in the 20th century. Take, for example, what the Canadian Jewish Congress reported in 1937: “…Jews have been barred from hotels, beaches, golf courses and parks…” Quotas became institutionalized. And this was not reserved only for Jews: the “restrictive covenant” agreement law prevented property from being “sold…rented…and shall never be occupied or used…by any person of the Jewish, Hebrew, Semitic, negro or coloured race or blood…”

Colloquial references to the immigrant atmosphere of Jewish-owned resorts of the Catskills (“the Borscht Belt”) are affectionately documented in novels, theatre, film, and comedy. What we know little about, however, is the Canadian experience of the same period (c.1930s-60s). While somewhat similar, it was actually quite different. Against the backdrop of pernicious anti-Jewish laws and sympathies escalating in Europe that stripped Jews and others of rights and property, this talk examines the architectural and cultural history of Jewish resorts that developed in the Laurentians and Muskokas, sites frequented by Jewish patrons who lived in Montreal and Toronto, at the time the largest Jewish communities in Canada. These understudied stories tell us much about the Modern Jewish experience and the discriminatory practices proper to a Canadian history untold. When read against “restricted” hotels, the stories reveal -- perhaps most ironically -- the social and spatial constructions of Jewish life, the effect of widespread racial quotas, class hierarchy aspirations of hotel owners and their patrons, and ultimately, how discrimination shapes architecture.

Shelley Hornstein is Senior Scholar and Professor Emerita of Architectural History & Urban Culture at York University, Toronto, Canada. She explores the intersection of memory and place in architectural and heritage sites, with themes on tourism, nationhood. Her newest book is Architectural Tourism: Site-Seeing, Itineraries and Cultural Heritage (Lund Humphries, 2020). Others include Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (Ashgate, 2011), Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2003), Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (McGill-University Press, 2000). She is an ISGAP Research Fellow (The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy) and Consultant with AEPJ (European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage. The recipient of international awards, fellowships, and guest professorships, she serves on advisory boards for several academic journals.
 

Éva Huszti and Balázs Venkovits
University of Debrecen
Immigration, Integration and Social Capital: History of the Hungarian St. Stephen's Ball in Montréal, 1959-2013
After the defeat of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, Canada welcomed close to 38,000 Hungarian refugees that provided a boost to Hungarian-Canadian communities all over the country. The second most popular destination for the newly-arriving Hungarians (after Ontario and Toronto) was the province of Quebec and in particular Montreal. As a result, the community in the city grew to approximately 20,000 strong. Upon their arrival, Hungarian immigrants could rely on formal and informal institutions and networks established by former immigrants since the 1920s but they still faced numerous challenges. One of them involved the question of how they could integrate into Canadian society, while also trying to preserve their cultural heritage, a strategy also highlighted by Berry (1974, 1997) as a favorable process for both the host society and immigrant communities on the long term. This paper explores the history of the Hungarian St. Stephen’s Ball in Montreal (1959-2013), which aimed to facilitate exactly this process; while presenting the objectives and key organizational features of the ball, we also reconstruct the social networking resources that contributed to the successful integration of Hungarians in the city. Based on archival resources and oral history interviews, we study the underlying social capital of Hungarian-Montrealers as well as the emergence and survival of social resources across generations, which not only contributed to the preservation of cultural identity and the acceptance of the culture of the host society but also facilitated a novel, integration acculturation strategy.

Éva Huszti, PhD is a sociologist, associate professor at the University of Debrecen, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Political Science and Sociology, Department of Sociology of Social Policy. Her research interests include research methods of egocentric social networks, social relations, solidarity, social integration, inclusion, social capital.

Balázs Venkovits is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. He is the director of the Institute of English and American Studies and the Canadian Studies Centre at the university. He earned his Ph.D. in 2014 and completed his habilitation in 2021. Among others, he is the recipient of OTKA (2022-26) and Jedlik (2013-14) grants, a JFK Research Fellowship (2013) and a Fulbright (2010-2011). His academic interests include travel writing studies, migration studies, Hungarian immigration to North America, with a special emphasis on Hungarians in Canada in and after the 1920s.
 

János Kenyeres
Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
Trauma and Identity in Atom Egoyan’s Recent Films
Atom Egoyan has made significant contributions to Canadian film over the past few decades, leaving a lasting mark on the country’s cinematic landscape. This presentation will focus on the director’s use of different genres and genre elements in the representation of trauma and identity, a fundamental feature of his cinematic world, and how they take on new forms in his recent films. The feature films discussed are Ararat (2002), The Captive (2014), Remember (2015) and Guest of Honour (2019). Two of these films depict the long-term effects of major historical events, while the other two focus on small and local issues. By exploring hidden facets of trauma and problematic identities, these films contribute to a deeper knowledge of how the past influences and is intertwined with individual and social experiences in the present. Egoyan’s films mix genres such as historical, family and psychological drama, thriller, mystery and elements of absurdism and comedy to such an extent that they have been criticised for being overcrowded in terms of subject matter, with so much going on that it is like watching several films at once. The presentation will explore how these different genre elements of the films contribute to their overall effect in conveying themes and ethical issues through the portrayal of the characters and the settings in which they appear.

János Kenyeres is Director and Associate Professor of the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University. He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in English and Hungarian Literature in 1991 and received his Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2000. He was a visiting professor of Hungarian at the University of Toronto in 2018-2019, 2015 and 2005-2008, where his work focused on Hungarian literature, cinema and culture. He habilitated in literary studies in 2014 and is a member of the Doctoral School of Literary Studies at Eötvös Loránd University.

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka
University of Debrecen
The paper examines three contemporary Canadian short stories – Djamila Ibrahim’s “Kept Woman” (2018), Cynthia Flood’s “One Two Three Two One” (2013), and Zsuzsi Gartner’s “Pest Control for Dummies” (1999) – that explore early maternal embodiment and the choice to get or remain pregnant. Central to these texts is the presentation of the maternal body as a site of potential harm, tension, and devastation. The stories operate with surreal sequences and intense descriptions of unruly, unpredictable, and ailing bodies in order to convey the characters’ anxieties associated with new motherhood. With their hyperfocus on embodiment as well as dreamlike and hallucinatory episodes, the stories reflect on traumatic events that defy coherent linguistic expression. I will trace how their narrative features – metalepsis, the silencing of the maternal characters, narrative gaps, and rich metaphoricity – underscore the unsayability of certain maternal experiences, especially when related to trauma. By relying on the insights of narratology, trauma theory, and motherhood studies, I will also reflect on the extent to which this subcorpus is representative of (post)millennial North American mothertexts and how they fit into a larger trend of explicit, grim stories that map early maternal embodiment while engaging with the inherent unnarratability of early motherhood.

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at the North American Department of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. The title of her dissertation as well as the topic of her upcoming monograph is Mothers in the Wake of Slavery: The Im/possibility of Motherhood in Post-1980 African American Women’s Prose. Her research on North American representations of embodiment, motherhood, and womanhood has been published in journals such as Short Fiction in Theory & Practice (2022), Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2023), and Canadian Literature (2023) as well as in edited collections such as Critical Insights: The Color Purple (Salem Press, 2022) and Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (Edinburgh UP, 2023). She is the editor of a special issue of the journal Short Fiction in Theory & Practice titled Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives (2026) and co-editor of the upcoming collection Contemporary Maternal Subjectivities on the Page and on the Screen (Sciendo-De Gruyter Brill, 2027).

Ian Desmond Mauer
Northeast Normal University, China
Mnemonic Liminality in Shueng-King’s You Are Eating an Orange. You are Naked
Shueng-King’s You are eating an orange. You are Naked is a surreal and fragmented work of autofiction attempting to understand transcultural identity in the Canadian context. The primary theme of the novel is how self-love allows us to overcome the many barriers we confront in life. Shueng-King starts off with Heidegger’s idea that we are thrown into the world at the beginning of our lives without choice. Our narrator could have been a truck driver in Norway. Instead, he is a Chinese-Canadian who was born in Vancouver and who grew up in Hong Kong. How does this impact his life and how he lives it? The narrator wants to show us that we do not know why anything happens the way it does. However, our language, identity, and memories shape us into a way of being in the world around us. Through an ability to love, we can know ourselves deeply and escape a hole of existential hopelessness that an uprooted transculturalism may bring about. Through love, we can shape the memories we hope to see become our future world.

In his debut novel, Sheung-King is writing about a hole, but what is this hole and what should we know about it? Is it a linguistic miscommunication? A cultural misunderstanding? The paradoxical and bewildering belief in simultaneously opposing philosophical worldviews? Or is it simply a desire to be loved and to be a voice for love? In You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked Sheung-King addresses the identification dilemma through intricately interlaced storytelling to illustrate his own process of becoming. He draws upon his knowledge of translanguaging as well as a hybrid awareness of culture in order to construct this Canadian narrative on transculturalism, showing us how to embrace identity construction and shape a loving understanding of ourselves.

Ian Desmond Mauer is a Canadian English teacher who has been living abroad for more than fifteen years. He has previously lived in Thailand, Japan, Qatar, Oman, and Indonesia. At present, he is pursuing a PhD at Northeast Normal University in China. He specializes in critical and creative English writing instruction and is interested in how diverse cultural narratives can be expressed through the use of the English language.

Judit Nagy
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, Hungary
Canadian Missionary Women’s Contribution to Korean Society
This paper will explore the impact of Canadian missionary women on Korean society from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century.

During this period Canadian missionary women established or taught in educational institutions throughout Korea, providing modern education to Korean girls and women. Not only did these schools offer academic instruction but also vocational training, empowering women to become self-reliant and active participants in society.

Second, these missionaries also established or worked in hospitals and clinics, where they introduced modern medical practices, improved contemporary public health standards and access to medical care.

Finally, in addition to education and health care, Canadian missionary women advocated for social justice and women’s rights, addressing issues such as poverty, child welfare, and gender inequality. Their example also helped instill a spirit of independence and self-reliance among Koreans.

Based on Yoo (1996), Tark (1999), Choi (2020) and Kim-Cragg (2022), I will argue that - through their active participation in education, healthcare, and social reform -, Canadian missionary women such as Florence Jessie Murray, Louise McCully, or Lillian Dickson contributed to the modernization and development of Korea. Moreover, I will also demonstrate that female presence in missionary work was essential to provide Korean women with Western education.

Judit Nagy is a full-time associate professor, director of the Canada Center and vice-dean for international affairs at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. She defended her PhD dissertation in Canadian literature at Eötvös Loránd University in 2009. Her first research project on East Asians in North America dates back to 2012. Since then, she has authored book chapters, articles and educational materials, has co-edited books and has delivered guest lectures, workshops and conference presentations in Austria, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Romania, Poland and South Korea related to minorities, especially the East Asian diaspora in North America. Her current research focuses on the Korean diaspora in Canada.

Andrea O'Reilly
York University
“I Am Not Responsible for Your Decision:” Monique Lépine’s Aftermath and the Judgment of Maternal Culpability
The paper examines the memoir of a mother whose son committed one of the most infamous school shootings in North America and then died by suicide, the Montreal Massacre in Canada (1989). The École Polytechnique massacre, also known as the Montreal massacre, was a mass shooting at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada that occurred on December 6, 1989. Twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine began his attack by separating the male students from the female students and after calling the women a “bunch of feminists” proceeded to kill fourteen women and injured another ten women and four men. He then died by suicide. His suicide note blamed feminists for the failure of his life. 

The memoir narrates what Lépine describes as “her descent into nightmare,” as she seeks to understand what caused her son to commit the massacre and die by suicide. The paper explores the mother’s journey toward understanding her son’s crime and death through denial, anger, grief, shame, and, eventually, healing. I examine the normative discourse of good motherhood and how it informs and shapes the mother’s attempt to explain and comprehend how her son, in Lépine’s words, “turned into a heartless murderer” (22). In particular, I address two salient beliefs of normative motherhood: first, good mothers raise good children and bad mothers raise bad children; and second, good mothers, as involved parents, should and must know their children. Lépine in their poignant rendering and remembering of mothering delivers a potent critique and corrective to these conjectures of normative motherhood. What readers learn in this memoir of loss is that children may be unknowable and that mothers are not responsible for the actions of their children. In so doing, the memoir astutely disrupts, disputes, and discredit mother blame as it is enacted in the judgment of maternal culpability.

Dr. Andrea O’Reilly is internationally recognized as the founder of Motherhood Studies (2006) and its subfield Maternal Theory (2007), and creator of Matricentric Feminism, a feminism for and about mothers (2016) and Matricritics, a literary theory/practice for a reading of mother-focused texts (2021). She is Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, founder/editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and publisher of Demeter Press. She is co-editor/editor of thirty plus books motherhood and author of three monographs including most recently Matricentric Feminism: Theory Activism, Practice, the 2nd Edition (2021).  Her collection In (M)otherwords; Writings on Mothering and Motherhood 2009-2024 was published spring 2024 and in the fall her next edited book, The Mother Wave: Theorizing, Enacting, and Representing Matricentric Feminism will be published. She is completing a monograph on motherhood in post-2010 women’s narratives and conducting a study on millennial mothers.

Vedran Obućina
Centre for Interreligious Dialogue, Croatia
Interreligious aspects of motherhood in Canada
In Native Canadian cultures, motherhood is often regarded as a sacred role deeply intertwined with spiritual and community life. Maternal figures are seen as life-givers and caretakers of the earth, embodying a connection to the land that is both spiritual and practical. This holistic view of motherhood encompasses not only the physical nurturing of children but also the transmission of cultural values, traditions, and spiritual beliefs. In many First Nations communities, the concept of motherhood extends beyond biological relationships to include communal child-rearing practices, where the community as a whole participates in nurturing and educating the young.

Exploring the connections between First Nations Canadian perspectives on motherhood and interreligious dialogue provides a unique lens for examining how different spiritual traditions approach and understand maternal roles. For instance, both Native Canadian and certain religious traditions view motherhood as a divine or sacred duty, though they may express this reverence through different rituals and practices. Paper investigates how these parallels and differences are represented in Canadian media and arts, offering insights into broader societal values and beliefs about motherhood.

Interreligious dialogue can benefit from incorporating Native Canadian views on motherhood, fostering a deeper appreciation of the shared values of nurturing, care, and community responsibility. This dialogue can also address the impact of colonialism on Indigenous maternal practices and identities, exploring how these communities have resisted and adapted to external pressures while maintaining their cultural integrity. Furthermore, such discussions can highlight the resilience and agency of Native Canadian mothers in preserving their traditions and spirituality in the face of adversity.

Vedran Obućina is a Croatian political scientist, historian, and theologian. He received his PhD in modern religious history at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and is fellow of peace studies at the Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand) and fellow of Kaiciid International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (Lisbon, Portugal). He presides over the Centre for Interreligious Dialogue in Rijeka, Croatia, and deals with interreligious dialogue academically and practically.

Mária Palla
Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary
Sharing Food at Home and Abroad: Fictionalizing the Hungarian-Canadian Emigrant Experience
This presentation explores stories of emigration from Hungary to Canada via Austrian refugee camps in the wake of the 1956 revolution crushed by the Soviets. The three narratives to be discussed provide ample detail of the preceding events, most importantly those related to the Second World War, especially the Holocaust. Béla Szabados (1942-), Erika Gottlieb (1938-2007), and Endre Farkas (1948-) fled Hungary to escape to Canada in the years between 1956 and 1958. Szabados, in his In Light of Chaos (1990), and Gottlieb, in her Becoming My Mother’s Daughter: Survival and Renewal (2008), each employs a protagonist who embodies the author’s thinly disguised autobiographical self. Although Farkas’s Never, Again (2016) is unquestionably based on his own childhood experiences, the use of a third person narrator in the novel establishes a greater distance between author and protagonist.

However, all three narratives are, first and foremost, embedded in family histories, which leads to a high degree of intersubjectivity in all three works. Therefore, the presentation focuses on how personal relationships are established, reinforced or reflected upon by the various ways in which food is prepared, offered, shared, or consumed. Powerful food memories also serve as markers of identity relating the characters to painful events of the past. The psychological responses given to the somatic experience of eating the food of the homeland or that of new locations are indicative of the degrees of comfort, adaptation, cultural change, and social interaction each protagonist develops, all to be discussed in the presentation.

Mária Palla is assistant professor at the Institute of English and American Studies of Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. Having graduated with a dual MA in English and Russian Studies from the University of Debrecen, she conducted research and taught courses in Canada and at various universities in Hungary. She earned her PhD at ELTE University, Budapest, in literary and cultural studies. Currently, her academic work focuses on various aspects of diasporic writing including trauma narratives and food memories shaping immigrant identities. She has published extensively on the literary representation of the Hungarian and the South Asian diasporas living in Canada and Britain.

Éva Pataki
University of Debrecen
“After all, we’ve brought India with us”: Migration, Home, and Belonging in South Asian Canadian Literature
According to Maya Dutt, “Much of the immigrant […] Canadian literatures produced in the recent past deals with multicultural issues that either posit unity in diversity or seek a merger of the various racial and cultural groups in Canada. The texts seem to suggest that both of these are myths where the core symbols are distance and difference” (2003:184).  While the first notable generation of South Asian Canadian authors entering the spotlight in the 1980s, such as Rohinton Mistry and Michael Ondaatje rarely write about migration, when they do, they indeed provide a complex picture of how different communities interact and converge, and how Canada may become a home away from home. The second generation, such as Farida Karodia, and emerging new 21st century South Asian Canadian novelists offer multi-generational perspectives on migration and further challenge these myths by centering their fiction on notions of openness and diversity. The present paper traces the journey of narratives of migration, home, and belonging from Vassanji’s No New Land (1991) and Shani Mootoo’s 1993 short story collection Out on Main Street to Farzana Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen (2007) and Shyam Selvadurai’s Hungry Ghosts (2013), in an attempt to map the multifaceted yet shared immigrant experience of South Asian Canadians and their cultural identity as “a matter of ‘becoming’” (Hall 1990:394).  It argues that these personal (hi)stories foreground closeness through connection, through affective relationships that create the emotional geographies of Canada as a multicultural land.

Éva Pataki is an assistant professor at the North American Department, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her main area of research is postcolonial literature and a comprehensive study of identity, space, and affect, with a specific focus on the contemporary literature and film of the South Asian diaspora. She published several articles and four book chapters (Space, Identity and Discourse in Anglophone Studies, 2024; The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing, 2018; Space, Gender and the Gaze in Literature and Art, 2017; Cultural Imprints in the Age of Globalization: Writing Region and Nation, 2012) in this field of study.

Robert Stacey
University of Ottawa
Livesay’s “The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre” Revisited: Towards a Poetics of ‘The Project’
I can’t be the only person who thinks that Dorothy Livesay’s “The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre” is a totally bizarre piece of work. First presented as an ACCUTE paper in 1969 and subsequently included in Eli Mandel’s influential anthology Contexts of Canadian Criticism (1971), the essay remains one of the most cited texts in Canadian poetics—an almost-mandatory touchtone for any discussion of research-based poetries in this country. Indeed, Livesay’s comments about the documentary poem being “based on topical data,” the “actual data itself, rearranged for eye and ear,” seem to anticipate what Michael Leong has more recently described as “documental poetry,” a “research poetry based on documentation” wherein poets appropriate and repurpose “information” for political and aesthetic ends (Contested Records 8). But that is not really what Livesay’s essay is about. If it were, she would not have spent the bulk of her essay discussing Malcolm’s Katie. Livesay’s understanding of “documentary” would appear to cut across poetries that are research-based and non-research-based, citational and non-citational, informational and non-informational. If there is a common denominator that links Livesay’s examples in the essay, it is not to be found in what we normally think of as documentary techniques or materials, but in representations of collective projects and work.

My paper argues that what Livesay theorizes is better understood as a “project poem”: a sort of georgic poem of improvement which places work at the centre of an historical process wherein the community produces itself via the production of works that stand in opposition to uncultivated or uncivilized nature. “Projects” in their own right, Livesayian documentaries adhere to a rationalist logic whereby, as Alphonso Lingis argues, “rationalists perceive the reality of being members of a community in the reality of works undertaken and realized; [they] perceive the community itself as a work” (Lingis, “The Other Community” 5). Despite its seeming gestures in the direction of a “documental" poetics, then, Livesay’s understanding of the documentary is more ideological than formal and more prescriptive than descriptive. It is, in fact, not a Canadian “genre” at all, but a thematics of Canadian literary-nationalism that was already normative at the time.

Robert Stacey is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. He has published widely on Canadian poetry and fiction and is the editor of RE: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature After Modernism (UOttawa P, 2010.)  His most recent project is entitled ‘The Canadian Poetry Project Project.’ It is projected to produce a monograph in the next few years.

Gertrud Szamosi
University of Pécs, Hungary
Jane Urquhart’s Heavenly Ghosts
Jane Urquhart is a highly esteemed yet lesser-known contemporary Canadian writer and poet whose distinctive writing style is marked by richly evocative language use. The novel’s dual narrative structure, set in Toronto and the Yorkshire moors, spans two main periods, while it features Ann Frear, a contemporary Emily Brontë scholar, and the Victorian parachutist Arianna Ether. When Arianna tragically dies in an accident in 1900, she ascends to heaven and encounters the ghost of Emily Brontë. In what follows, the three female characters embark on a journey of exploration, and their story unravels a complex web of literary, historical, and personal issues intricately woven into the fabric of Wuthering Heights. 

My reading of the novel will focus on the significance of the different ghosts and the role of haunting. Emily’s and Arianna’s ghosts are deeply intertwined with one another and with the life of the literary scholar Ann. I will also focus on the implications of ghosts as metaphors, highlighting themes of memory, identity, love, and artistic creativity. 

Gertrud Szamosi is a senior lecturer at the Institute of English Studies of the University of Pécs. She has taught and published in Canadian, Scottish, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Transnational literatures. She has published in Canadian literature on Margaret Laurence, Alistair Macleod, Emily Carr, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Tamas Dobozy, and other writers.

Ildikó Szilágyi
Université de Debrecen, Département de Francais
Formes poétiques et identité culturelle dans la littérature québécoise
Le choix de telle ou telle forme poétique marque une prise de position, pourvue d’enjeux esthétique, psychologique et historique. Il s’agira de montrer, à travers quelques exemples représentatifs, en quoi les décisions formelles des poètes participent à la construction de l’identité culturelle dans la poésie québécoise. Celle-ci se distingue non seulement de la poésie anglophone du Canada, mais entretient une relation ambivalente avec la littérature française.

On va étudier la problématique identitaire associée à la poésie dans une perspective historique: la revendication de l’appartenance à l’espace culturel français sera abandonnée au profit de l’affirmation de l’autonomie et de la singularité de la poésie canadienne francophone.

Notre point de départ est la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle qui est caractérisée par des imitations et des essais d’adaptation des formes poétiques européennes. C’est le sonnet qui devient vite le type de poème le plus souvent utilisé et qui gardera très longtemps sa place privilégiée (Anthologie des sonnets au Québec, 2013). L’œuvre d’Émile Nelligan (Poésies complètes 1896-1899) s’inspire des parnassiens et des symbolistes français, tout en introduisant des thèmes typiquement québécois. Pour montrer l’évolution de la forme du sonnet au Québec, on prend l’exemple des sonnets de Robert Melançon (Le paradis des apparences, 2004).

On présente ensuite le rôle du verset claudélien dans le renouvellement formel de la poésie québécoise à travers les versets d’Anne Hébert (Mystère de la parole, 1960). Le verset est une forme poétique spécifiquement francophone, touchant souvent à une thématique religieuse ou spirituelle. Sa présence au Québec est due à l’importance du catholicisme et à l’influence du poète catholique Paul Claudel.

On s’intéresse pour finir à la vogue actuelle du haïku, plus populaire au Québec qu’en France, en prenant appui sur l’œuvre d’André Duhaime (Haïku et francophonie canadienne, 2000).

Ildikó Szilágyi est maître de conférences au Département de Français de l’Université de Debrecen. Elle enseigne la littérature française (XIXe-XXe siècles). Elle s’intéresse au renouvellement des formes poétiques. Elle a publié en 2021 sa thèse de HDR sur Formes, tendances et méthodes d’analyse dans la poésie française moderne et contemporaine. Elle a participé à plusieurs ouvrages collectifs sur la poésie francaise et québécoise: “Le verset: entre le vers et le paragraphe,” Études littéraires 39, 2007; “La fragmentation et le brouillage des genres poétiques,” in Lire du fragment: analyses et procédés littéraires, Montréal, Nota bene, 2008; “Le pantoum au Québec”, in Les Actes du colloque international, “Espaces de l'imaginaire: le Canada vu par l’Europe, l’Europe vue par le Canada,” Brno, 2009, “Mesure et démesure: les choix formels des poètes québécois du XXe siècle,” Transcanadiana, Katowice, 2012.

Gabriella T. Espák
University of Debrecen
Stuart McLean’s Canada: A Multimodal Approach
Remembered as “one of the country’s most beloved storytellers” (McMaster University Library), radio journalist Stuart McLean’s 40-year career is best known for the Vinyl Café series. Less popular attention, let alone scholarship focuses on another, singular piece which, nonetheless, epitomizes McLean’s dedicated approach to his country as well as his profession. “Stuart McLean’s History of Canada” (CBC Records, 2006) is a unique half-an-hour performance that recycles Canadian history, mashing its narrative with classic tunes and humorous commentary. With subtle irony, he re-evaluates key historical events to reflect on the turmoil Canada navigated through at the end of the 20th century – a period of federal identity crisis. Taking McLean’s performance both as a prompt and as demonstration, this presentation argues that the field of Canadian history is a contested terrain not only for historians of various affiliations but also for popular culture. It is a serious and sensitive field to teach, which may as well produce the kind of fatigue experienced by Canadians in the period. Hence “History of Canada” can be a useful educational aid complementing the regular curriculum because, in addition to humour, it relies on mixing pieces of music, each of which represents a historical narrative of identity through audial appeal. The resulting – occasionally cacophonic – polyphony renders a new, multimodal interpretation to the once static Canadian mosaic, which introduces a refreshing approach to the classroom.

Gabriella T. Espák is Assistant Professor in the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. She has been teaching, researching and publishing on topics in Australian, Canadian and US social history since 1998, with special interest in issues of multiculturalism, minority rights and Indigeneity. She edited ReVisions of Australia: Histories, Images, Identities, a special double issue of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (12.1-2, 2006), and authored Seminal Years: Federal Multicultural Policies and the Politics of Indigeneity in Canada and Australia (Debrecen UP, 2020).

Gabriel Thym
Concordia University
Kondiaronk: An Indigenous Historical Figure in Canadian Public Memory 
The Petun-Wendat chief Kondiaronk is primarily known as a prominent and skilled orator who played a fundamental role in negotiating the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701, a turning point in North American diplomacy that ended long-standing conflicts among Indigenous nations and the French. In philosophy, Kondiaronk is known to have been the model for Adario in Lahontan’s Dialogues with a Savage, a highly influential text for the Enlightenment that reinforced the concept of the “noble savage”. However, Kondiaronk’s memorialization is highly paradoxical as it oscillates between glorification as a mythical hero and complete oblivion in collective memory, reflecting the complexities of memorializing Indigenous figures in Canadian history.

This paper examines how his image has been shaped and reshaped over time, as well as the different narratives of his life:
-Glorified but obscured: Kondiaronk is commemorated as a heroic figure by many historians but remains largely unknown to the population and outside of Quebec.
-The historical and mythical narratives, a selective memory: His real contributions and motivations have been overshadowed by romanticized narratives, which simplify his complex legacy. 
Kondiaronk died during the peace negotiations of 1701 and was buried in Montreal. His remains lie somewhere in old-Montreal, in a very touristic area.
This research employs a comparative analysis of historical and fictional texts, memorial plaques, and public records to highlight the disparity in memorial practices. This topic is perfectly relevant to the conference theme as it is a specifically Canadian story.

Originally from Luxembourg, Gabriel Thym is pursuing a MA in social and cultural anthropology at Concordia University, after having graduated with a BFA in Film Studies at the same university. His thesis research looks at the politics of memory, focused on the memorialization of the Indigenous historical figure Kondiaronk. Besides academia, Gabriel participated in various film festivals in Europe and Montreal as a jury member and volunteer, and has a strong interest in documentary cinema and the use of audio-visual media to teach historic topics. Since October 2022, Gabriel has been an active student affiliate at Concordia’s Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and has been a co-organizer for the 10th symposium on oral history in 2023.

Katharine Viscardis
Northern Lakes College
“Keep them at Home:” Resisting Institutional Care in Postwar Ontario
“I’d rather have to tell parents, ‘your child is dead,’” said an Ontario pediatrician in 1958 in reference to the birth of a baby born with developmental disability. Myths about disability as being a biological fault of the individual, as being a tragic accident, and as being a menace to national health have played a foundational role in institutional violence in Canada. Such myths have provided the necessary justification for separating families, segregating children in institutions, and ignoring the violent landscapes of institutions themselves. This paper examines the efforts of a small group of mothers in postwar Ontario to challenge the power of medical and social authorities that had told them for decades that custodial care was the best option for their so-called “retarded” children. Children who, according to medical practitioners at the time, would be better off dead. It examines how some mothers worked together to keep their children at home in the face of immense systemic barriers and pressures to “put them away.” Through an exploration of oral histories, such as the letters of mothers and other family members written to the Globe and Mail advice columnist, Mrs. Thompson, this paper tells a story of resistance to the dominant institutional model at a time when approximately 3,000 children were waiting to be institutionalized. The Ontario Association of Community Living (OCAL), an organization that now has “13 Provincial and Territorial associations and over 300 local associations,” transpired from the written letters, coffee time meet-ups, and “play dates” organized by these women. The mothers at the helm of this advocacy played a significant, yet often overlooked, role in the movement for deinstitutionalization in Ontario. Far from acquiescent to institutional oppression and control, as these mothers are often assumed to be, this small group of women worked hard to challenge and change the narrative of failure, loss, and hopelessness ascribed to their children’s minds, bodies, and futures.

Katharine Viscardis is an academic researcher in the fields of childhood and disability studies. Her work focuses on historical cases of institutional violence against children in custodial facilities. Katharine works with survivors of the Huronia Regional Centre, Canada’s oldest and largest institution for children and adults with disabilities, to share their stories of institutional violence with all who will listen. She also currently works as an instructor at Northern Lakes College in Alberta College.

Dalibor Žíla
Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic
L’imaginaire de la fin du monde à travers trois récits de Julie D. Kurtness (The image of the end of the world through three novels by Julie D. Kurtness)
Julie D. Kurtness (1981) est une autrice québécoise, lauréate du prix Voix autochtones en 2018 pour son roman De vengeance. Membre de la tribu innue, originaire de Mashteuiatsh, l’écrivaine représente les tendances contemporaines da la littérature québécoise autochtone, surtout celles liées à l’écocritique. Dans notre contribution, nous analyserons ses trois dernières parutions: le roman Aquariums (2019), le récit “Bienvenue, Alyson” (2022) et la nouvelle La vallée de l'étrange (2023). Dans le premier roman analysé, nous sommes témoins d’un monde où les océans sont ravagés par les changements climatiques. Émeraude, une jeune biologiste marine, est partie pour une mission dans l'Arctique, lorsque la planète devient frappée par une épidémie. Dans le court récit “Bienvenue, Alyson,” Kurtness nous propose la réflexion sur le rôle de l’humanité sur notre planète et notre dépendance aux technologies. Comme dans le récit précédent, nous sommes face à un univers dystopique, un récit aux saveurs écocritiques, où l’humanité subit aux cataclysmes provoqués par un champignon qui se répand sans contrôle. Dans le dernier roman analysé, La vallée de l'étrange, notre monde devient déstabilisé par l’avent des robots à l’intelligence artificielle. De nouveau, l’autrice nous propose sa vision d’un univers dystopique et ses angoisses de la technologie qui met en danger l’existence même de l’humanité. Dans notre contribution, nous étudierons comment les notions de survie et d'écocritique, ainsi que les éléments de la fin du monde et de la promesse de renouveau, sont représentés à travers ces trois œuvres.

Julie D. Kurtness (1981) is a contemporary Quebec author, who became winner of the Voix autochtones prize in 2018 for her novel De vengeance. A member of the Innu tribe from Mashteuiatsh, the writer represents contemporary trends in Quebec autochthone literature, especially those related to ecocriticism. In our contribution, we are about to analyze her three most recent books: the novel Aquariums (2019), her short story “Bienvenue, Alyson” (2022) and the book La vallée de l'étrange (2023). In the first novel analysed, we do witness a world where the oceans are ravaged by a climate change. Émeraude, a young marine biologist, went on a mission in the Arctics, while the planet is strucked by an epidemics. In the short story “Bienvenue, Alyson,” Kurtness reflects on humanity's role on our planet and our dependence on modern technologies. As well as in her previous novel, we are faced with a dystopian universe, another story with an ecocritical tendencies, where humanity suffers cataclysms caused by a fungus that spreads with no control. In the last novel analysed, La vallée de l'étrange, our world is destabilized by the advent of artificially intelligent robots. Once again, the author provides us with her vision of a dystopian universe and her anxieties about technology endangering the very existence of the humanity. In our contribution, we will explore how the notions of survival and ecocriticism, as well as the elements of the end of the world and the promise of renewal, are represented in these three works.

Dalibor ŽÍLA, doctorant en lettres romanes à la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université Masaryk de Brno (République tchèque). Je me spécialise en littérature québécoise. Ma thèse de doctorat porte sur l’Imaginaire de la fin du monde dans le roman québécois contemporain.

Dalibor ŽÍLA, doctoral student in Romance Literatures at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic). I specialize in Quebec literature. The topic of my dissertation is the image of the end of the world in the contemporary Quebec novel.

Panel on decolonizing and growing Canadian Studies: Migratory and multiple heritage epistemologies, connections, and praxis from the lens of Filipino/a/x studies in Canada

The Philippines is a top source country of immigration to Canada with nearly one million residents of Filipino heritage. In this panel presentation, three social work doctoral students will connect across their trajectories of forming epistemological and ontological orientations rooted in Filipino, de-/post-colonial, transnational, feminist, and/or political-economy frameworks. Filipino migration to Canada has been occurring since before the 1960s, yet major increases and shifts reflect the 1970s President Ferdinand Marcos regime’s entrenchment of a “migrant export economy” in a global neoliberal context, and Canadian immigration policy changes.

This panel presentation will highlight the enduring effect of colonial and imperial histories in the Philippines on migratory and diasporic identity and community formations, and agentive and resistive strategies. By differently analysing local and global contexts and regimes of power shaped by age, gender, sexuality, class, race, ability and settler colonialism in Canada, the presenters hope to generate more dialogue to grow Filipino/a/x studies in Canada and expand Canadian studies.

Jacqueline Stol (McGill University) explores the diasporic notion of return through queer, decolonial and Filipino epistemologies based in kapwa (interrelatedness with others) stemming from her dissertation using Photovoice and Kuwentuhan (Filipino talk-story) to surface the narratives of LGBTQ+ Filipino/a/xs in Montréal. Recounting her experiences of enforced migration and eventually residing in Canada as a settler, Nellie Alcaraz (McGill University) will share her migration/settlerhood journey from the Live-in Caregiver Program to becoming a social worker, conveying how she navigates decolonial practices in her community organising work. With the increasing feminisation of poverty, globally and in Canada, and from her lived and policy experience on poverty, Anabelle Ragsag (McMaster University) shares her PhD research on the impact of technological welfare surveillance on Filipino solo mothers participating in Ontario Works, a workfare-based social assistance in the province of Ontario, and the many ways by which they endure and refuse this surveillance.

Jacqueline Stol is a Ph.D. Candidate at McGill university bridging her experiences in social and community work through participatory and creative research and pedagogical interventions. Her areas of research focus on formations of queer and trans diaspora and community organizing and social movements amid histories and contexts of displacement and migration, particularly among the Filipino/a/x diaspora.

Anabelle Ragsag is a PhD student at McMaster University, as well as an educator and community organizer. She was working in international and community development prior to her PhD, specifically in political affairs, program development and evaluation. Her research interests have been shaped by her experiences growing up in a Global Majority country with post colonial legacies as well as experiences implicated in the feminization of global poverty and migration. She is originally from Mindanao, southern Philippines, and currently divides her time between Hamilton, Bandar Seri Begawan, and Manila.

Nellie Alcaraz came to Canada from the Philippines under the federal live-in caregiver program. She has been a community organizer and a migrant rights advocate for more than a decade. She is completing her Ph.D. at McGill University’s School of Social Work under the supervision of Dr. Jill Hanley. Her doctoral research looks at the experiences of non-status migrants in Canada.

The abstract collection is available for download in PDF format by clicking here